Piracy of intellectual property was also part of reality back when the world was analogue rather than digital. There’s a direct line from the piracy of sheet music in the early 20th century to present-day file sharing on the internet, as described by Jan Drejer Petersen on the last pages of this issue. However, while ‘pirate’ used to be an epithet appended to those guilty of illicit copying, now the file sharers themselves use the ord. This may have started with the Swedish ‘Piratbyrån’ (The Pirate Bureau), which arose as a countermeasure to ‘Antipiratbyrån’, a copyright-protection organisation. This issue is dedicated to pirates: both those who share files and those who take hostages. Timothy Wittig has written an insightful and thought-provoking article about the latter group on page 26.